Add a Bit of Winter Forest to the Table

Ilex Studio, in London, is best known for creating glass containers designed to encourage avocado pits and acorns to sprout. Now, for the winter table, the studio has introduced handmade beeswax candles cast from leafless tree branches. They come in nine woodsy colors, four of which are now sold in the United States at Paper…

How Do You Take Your Caffeine?

Don’t count Explorer Cold Brew from Brooklyn as just one more in a long list of companies with ready-made cold brew concentrates for iced or hot drinks. It offers a compelling, uncommon feature with its coffees: choice of caffeine content. No-caf, low-caf, regular caf and extra caf are the options, with the milligrams of caffeine…

Earthy Mushrooms, Bold Peppers

Hello, Five Weeknight Dishers. This is Krysten, stepping in for Emily. (Close watchers of this space will remember me as this newsletter’s editor!) I’m sorry to say it, but New Year’s Eve just isn’t my holiday. I love going to bed early and hate the passage of time. I don’t even really like Champagne. So…

Recipes for New Year’s Eve

Good morning. Greetings from isolation on this final day of what was for many an unsettling, un-fun year. There’ll be no Champagne and caviar for me tonight, no elegant roast, no countdown to 2022. I might tie some flies, listen to an old Ry Cooder show. Quarantine and testing, here’s to auld lang syne. I…

The Most-Read Food Stories of 2021

And so closes the second year of the pandemic, 12 months more of worry, of working from home, of trying to make each meal feel like something new. The articles that readers of the Food section and New York Times Cooking craved this year acknowledged this new reality. Many of our most-read stories offered tips…

Crispy Tofu and Vegetables Dinner

I used to be convinced that the only way to get truly crisp tofu was to fry it. I’d roasted it and broiled it, but I was never able to achieve those burnished, crisp corners that a pan full of screaming-hot oil reliably delivered. Then I tried a technique from Jenny Rosenstrach’s excellent cookbook, “The…